Suddenly 98% of thousands of key phrases are inactive - where they want to whack the bid up to 10 bucks!
Many of these terms are good converters, many have good CTR, many of them exactly match phrases on the landing pages.
Virtually all of these AdGroups are about a week old today.
Anyone else seeing this?
For calculating a keyword's minimum bid:The keyword's historical clickthrough rate (CTR) on Google; CTR on the Google Network is not considered
The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
The quality of your landing page
Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
Other relevance factors
My main account is 4+ years old with tons of residue.
Has anyone found that a new account will perform better than an old account ?
Poor, OK, Great? Are there more?
Minimum bids of .01, .03, .04, .05 and .10 are Great
Minimum bids of .15, .20, 30 are OK
Minimum bids of .40 and up are Poor
Account history CTR is a bad metric, it rewards trademark poachers (aka domain name bidders) and people who exaggerate claims in their ads. I understand it's intentions, by when you look at the complexities and range of what different marketers are doing, it seems very arbitrary to reward those who have plucked the easiest traffic moreso than others.
If I could see the internal scores within adwords, I bet the highest account history CTRs belong to domain name poachers, affiliates who are most often ripping off merchants for their own branded traffic and where it's often against that merchant's policies. AWA, you want to take that bet? Bet you $50! I can even supply you with information (example G searches) so you can see the ones doing this and then go check your system's internal stats.
It's ridiculous to reward bad behaving parties. I understand the thinking, the best ad writers and keyword analysts should be rewarded, but the key thing missing there is the nature of what type of traffic they are bidding on.
Let's say a merchant called giantwidgets.com advertises for two things: (1) products, using keywords like "large wdigets" (medium CTR) and (2) their brand, using keywords like "giantwidgets.com" (high CTR)... and they have an affiliate who only bids on their brand name... whose adwords account will have the higher historical CTR? The lazy affiliate will. And the merchant is put at a disadvantage algorithmically by the adwords system, to bid on their own brand name. There's something inherehtly assbackwards about G punishing deep marketing and rewarding shallow skimming of the low hanging fruit.
My personal concerns revolve around the issue of having many campaigns in the same account with vastly different targets and objectives. Some are inherently low CTR's. And I am to believe that the high performance campaigns are being held down by the low performers even though every campaign is meeting it's objective.
If account wide performance has any significant weight in the QS algo, then separate accounts MUST be the most equitable way of marketing different verticals and models.
Sad.
And a large waste of time and energy.
I created a new campaign and used a different domain but used the exactly same keywords and ads as old one.
I repeat;
the only difference between the old campaign, which was slapped by google, and new one is the domain.
Bid price returned normal now on my campaigns.
I don't know what kind of domain considered good or bad.
But I'm sure the domain is one of the factors affecting QS.
See this article summarizing Michael Gray's presentation at SMX Advanced 2008:
[bruceclay.com...]
Yes, it is very probable.
I was told by my account rep that Adwords and Organic Search have nothing to do with each other.
So was I.
But it is suspicious now to me.
The ideas some have in this thread (copy ads & keywords and advertise with new domains) was working for me the last slaps, too. This time it works first again, but at the end not more then 1 or 2 days and that`s it.
For me it seems that the google slaps before burned domain-names but you could bring it back with smaller ad groups, more deep focus themed, unique content, puplic privacy, etc. and all such seo-like-optimization, but this time it seems they slapped the hole account and did not look at the overall spending history.
I think it`s a manual review.
thanks...
The ideas some have in this thread (copy ads & keywords and advertise with new domains) was working for me the last slaps, too. This time it works first again, but at the end not more then 1 or 2 days and that`s it.
Since this solution doesn't address the original problem, it's never going to be more than a temporary solution, and it sounds like it's getting to be even more temporary.
So after reading all the comments, I do have one last question, has anyone had Google completely shut down their account?
Not personally, of course, but I do know of people who have had their accounts closed due their not being a good match with Google's business model, or words to that effect.
I was hoping the changes I made would affect the quality score by now but nothing’s changed, I can’t continue taking the losses hoping for it to improve.
I've made changes to my landing pages (no ad sense units) dynamic keyword entry to increase relevancy (not that it wasn’t relevant in the first place!), 1 keyword per ad group with unique ad.
I'm just going to have to hope YSM & Microsoft adCenter can keep me afloat, that and good ole SEO.
If anyone does get a QS improvement please share and tell us about what you did!
Peace Out.
did you try to just change the domainname?
copy everything (content/landingpages..) from the old domain to a new one. Copy in the Adwords Editor the complete campaign with the adgroups, pause the old campaign, change the domain-name in the visible and destination url in the ads from the new campaign and upload everything.
keyword-/adgroup- and campaign-quality-score is new, so everything should start normal (if there are no problems with account-quality-score), then the adwords-bot will for sure visit the landing page(s) in the next few days for the landing-page-quality-score. then you may be knows a little bit more.
Other improvement ideas are welcome.
Talking private via message/email/phone about how to find a way to come back would be ok for me, too.
